Henrik Bengtsson wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 11:36 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
>>> On 10/11/2009 11:16 PM, Tony Plate wrote:
>>>>> PS, I should have said that I'm reading the docs for unlink in R-2.10.0 on
>>> a Linux system. The docs that appear in a Windows installation of R are
>>> different (the Windows docs do not mention that not all systems support
>>> recursive=TRUE).
>>>>>> Here's a plea for docs to be uniform across all systems! Trying to write
>>> R code that works on all systems is much harder when the docs are different
>>> across systems, and you might only see system specific notes on a different
>>> system than the one you're working on.
>>>>> That's a good point, but in favour of the current practice, it is very
>> irritating when searches take you to functions that don't work on your
>> system.
>>>> One thing that might be possible is to render all versions of the help on
>> all systems, but with some sort of indicator (e.g. a colour change) to
>> indicate things that don't apply on your system, or only apply on your
>> system. I think the hardest part of doing this would be designing the
>> output; actually implementing it would not be so bad.
>>>> I 2nd this wishlist - to see the documentation for all (known)
> platforms, if possible.
One way to see this is to read the .Rd files, rather than the rendered
version.
> A very simple solution is to have an Rd
> section on operating-system specific features, e.g.
> \section{Differences between operating systems}{...}.
>> This would decrease the trial and error of producing cross-platform code.
>>This is not easy. For example, with unlink should the "recursive=TRUE"
option not be mentioned except in the platform-specific section? I
think that would make the docs a lot harder to read.
Duncan Murdoch
> /Henrik
>>>> Duncan Murdoch
>>>>>>> -- Tony Plate
>>>>>> Tony Plate wrote:
>>>>>>> The VALUE section in the help for 'unlink' says:
>>>>>>>> | 0| for success, |1| for failure. Not deleting a non-existent file is
>>>> not a failure, nor is being unable to delete a directory if |recursive =
>>>> FALSE|. However, missing values in |x| result are regarded as failures.
>>>>>>>> The last phrase doesn't make sense to me. Should it be either "missing
>>>> values in x are regarded as failures" or "missing values in x result in
>>>> failure" ?
>>>>>>>> Also, after reading the docs, I'm still unable to work out if unlink()
>>>> will return 1 when the user tries to recursively delete a directory on
>>>> systems that don't support recursive=T.
>>>>>>>> The DETAILS section says "recursive=TRUE is not supported on all
>>>> platforms, and may be ignored, with a warning", which could be interpreted
>>>> as implying no special action when recursive=TRUE is not implemented (other
>>>> than a warning()), and the VALUE section doesn't say what the return value
>>>> will be under such conditions.
>>>>>>>> I've skimmed the various *_unlink functions in src/main/platform.c, and
>>>> it looks like they all implement recursive=TRUE, so I'm still in the dark
>>>> about the required behavior on systems that don't support it. Could this be
>>>> clarified in the help file?
>>>>>>>> thanks,
>>>>>>>> Tony Plate
>>>>>>>> ______________________________________________
>>>>R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>>>>https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel>>>>>>>>>>> ______________________________________________
>>>R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>>>https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel>>>>> ______________________________________________
>>R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>>https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel>>>>>> ______________________________________________
>R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel>